But the struggle between the original Federalist view of the Constitution and its later hijacking by some of its anti-federal opponents has continued throughout American history, most notably in the South's resistance to Northern efforts to restrict the spread of slavery into new states and ultimately in the secession of Confederate states after Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.
Even after the South's defeat in the Civil War and the end of slavery, the white Southern aristocracy did not surrender its insistence on a crimped view of the Constitution, often finding allies among the powerful Northern "robber barons" of the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth. Both the segregationist Southerners and the laissez-faire capitalists of Wall Street wanted the federal government to keep its nose out of their business.
However, with the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt reached back to the original concept of the Constitution -- that the federal government was empowered to act on behalf of "the general Welfare," a principle embedded both in the Preamble and Article One, Section Eight.
Yet, when this federal activism began to encroach on the South's racial separation in the 1950s and 1960s, the Right again moved to reassert its revisionist take on the Constitution, that it supposedly enshrined states' rights as supreme.
Though the Right lost this battle to defend racial segregation -- much as the Anti-Federalists lost the fight to block the Constitution -- the political struggle was by no means over as Southern whites moved to the Republican Party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
With Reagan's victory in 1980, the stage was set for the ascendance again of right-wing revisionism on the Constitution, with Reagan and his Republican successors, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, installing on the U.S. Supreme Court right-wing ideologues who embraced the faux history that right-wing "scholars" had been busy assembling.
These ideological descendants of the South's slaveholders and the later alliance between the Robber Barons and Jim Crow are now positioned to interpret the Constitution as they see fit. Plus, they have a dedicated political movement in the Tea Party and on the Republican Right that has absorbed the made-up Founding Narrative of why the Constitution was written.
This combination of factors now presents an existential threat to the world because the Right's distortion of the Framers' original intent precludes crucial U.S. government action to restrain the spewing of climate-changing chemicals into the atmosphere.
It is a case where history is not just history, it is the future of mankind.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
